Angela Düntsch Art of Transformation

Angela grew up in Zürich, Switzerland. She has lived and worked on four continents, and currently lives in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. She has more than 35 years experience in practicing and sharing a wide variety of art forms such as circus skills, sculpting, music making, movement and more. For her, developing art based community relations projects and offering expressive arts therapy is a way to create space and opportunities where participants can get in touch with and develop their own strengths. Her interest in the circus arts was sparked when seeing Zirkus Rämmi Dämmi and observing their work with children in Osnabrück, Germany. When she moved to Northern Ireland, she learned to juggle with Jackie Juggle in Belfast, trained with the Belfast Community Circus School and worked with their outreach team.

In her hometown of Bangor, Co. Down, she founded a juggling club and co-created the One World Circus. She worked as a clown and offered circus skill workshops in several schools. During this time she took courses in clowning, mask play, and theater improvisation with the Scuola Teatro Dimitri in Verscio, Ticino, Switzerland.

Volunteering with the Multi-Cultural Resource Centre in Belfast gave her a deep understanding of the situation of people from diverse ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland. At Ulster University she studied Community Development and Community Relations. To promote a deeper understanding among diverse cultures in Northern Ireland she created the project “Skills, Game and Toys”. This project fostered understanding through engagement in the arts and direct contact with facilitators from diverse cultural background, and was given a prestigious award by the UK's  Millennium Commission.

After having moved to Canada in 2002 she studied the arts in the healing and social fields with Arscura, School for Living Art in Richmond Hill, and expressive arts therapy at the Create Institute in Toronto as well as the European Graduate School in Switzerland. 

For four years she volunteered at the Mental Health Unit of the General Hospital in St Catharines, conducting a weekly workshop in expressive arts for in-patients. Until the end of 2020 she worked as a psychotherapist in private practice. For a time, she was part of the team at the Attachment and Trauma Treatment Center for Healing, offering expressive arts therapy, as well as teaching supplementary workshops for the certification training. At the Living Institute in Toronto she taught the course “Improvisational Authenticity, Clowning and Creativity”. She exhibited mixed media paintings in Niagara Falls and St Catharines,  and took part in the project "Opening Doors to Dialogue" with Sam Thomas.

For 2021 Angela is looking forward to make new connections around the world, engaging in hands-on work in nature, possibly followed by offering or co-creating workshops in rural venues.